Here’s how Messersmith described the personal connections behind some of the songs on “Heart Murmurs.”

“It’s Only Dancing”

“The story in that one didn’t really happen, but it played off my experience growing up in a conservative church. There was no dancing allowed at all when I was a kid. I’d always thought about that, and how dancing can mean everything — or it can really mean nothing at all.”

“Steve”

“When I was 13 or 14, I had a youth pastor at church that I really liked and thought was a cool guy. One time, he told us he went into a gay and lesbian chat room in AOL and saw somebody wrote, ‘God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.’ We all just laughed at that. It stuck with me, though, and I felt like I had to kind of make up for that years later.”

“Tourniquet”

Photo by Greg Dixon

Jeremy Messersmith talks backstage at the High Noon Saloon in Madison, Wisconsin.

“Believe it or not, it actually started out as an attempt to write a gospel song, but one without all the Jesus in it and more just about the power of love.”

“Someday, Someone”

(which boasts an uncharacteristic F-bomb refrain)

“I read it on the Internet. It was just this picture people shared, like ‘If you’re having a bad day… ,’ and when you clicked on it, it said, ‘Someday, someone is going to love the [bleep] out of you.’ I liked that. Another thing that played into it: Somebody came up to me once and thanked me for being family-friendly. That’s not a bad thing, obviously, but the moment somebody puts you in a box like that, you think, ‘I gotta do something. I gotta put a song with the f-word in it, so no kids can listen to it.’ ”

Chris Riemenschneider has been covering the Twin Cities music scene since 2001, long enough to earn a shout-out from Prince during "Play That Funky Music (White Boy)." The St. Paul native was also a music critic at the Austin American-Statesman for five years.
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